by Sarah Dunant
“And that made you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“But that’s not why I cried.”
“Of course not. Now, come on, let’s go back to sleep.”
“It’s like cigarettes.”
“What is?”
“Your smelliness. Eleanor’s dad smells like that. Eleanor told him that he’s going to die, but she says he doesn’t care.” She was wide awake and cooking now, enjoying the transgression of being awake in the night.
“Hmmn. Well, we’re all going to die sooner or later. I bet Eleanor’s dad doesn’t smoke that much, anyway.”
“He does. She gets the packets out of the bin.”
“Little snitch.”
“What’s a snitch?”
“Nothing. Hey, it’s the middle of the night. Aren’t you tired?” Anna said, but not with any real passion. She loved Lily’s noise and curiosity, enjoyed these illicit night communions as much as her daughter did.
Lily lay quiet for a moment. Then: “Mum. Paul is sort of my dad, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, darling. Sort of.”
Pause. “So will Michael be like another dad now?”
“No, Michael’s just a friend. You do like him?”
“Oh yeah, he’s really funny. But I don’t want another dad. One’s enough.”
In the darkness Anna pulled her daughter to her closely. “Yes, one’s enough. How about mothers, though? Do you want another one of those?”
“No, silly,” she chirruped, curling her arms and legs around Anna’s body like a monkey.
Afterward Anna had lain awake reflecting on how easily she had moved back from him to her, the lover and mother separating out like oil and water. The next morning she had come back from taking Lily to school to hear the phone ringing through the front door. She knew it would be he. He had asked for her phone number rather than offering his own. She also knew what she was going to say. The one-night stand had given her everything she needed, even down to what she suspected had been their mutual lies.
“Morning.” His voice was already familiar, the cadence around a single word recognizable. She was surprised by how tender it made her feel. “How do you feel?”
“Tired.”
“Me too.” He paused, and the silence was suddenly full of his fingers, slipping inside her skirt, tracing a line down over her stomach. “Do you have to work today?”
“Yeah, I’m just on my way out.”
“Shame. Listen. I discover that I have to be in London again on Monday week. Can you get free?”
Thanks but no thanks, remember? But it was already too late. Along with the other things the night had given her had come a sudden taste for more. She would justify it to herself later. She tried to make it sound tough. “Okay. But now I have some rules. No promises, no bullshit. We don’t meet each other’s family and we can stop it anytime either of us wants, all right?”
“Absolutely.” He had sounded amused. “Anything else?”
“Yes. The restaurant has got to be cheaper. I don’t have that kind of money and it’s not all right if you pay.”
“Fine. You want to change anything about the sex, or did we get one thing right?”
“I’m thinking about it. For now we can leave it as it is.”
“Thank God for that.” Pause. “We picked well, didn’t we?”
“It’s early days,” she said. “Don’t push it.”
But of course, they had.
From behind her in the apartment she registered the sound of a shower turning off. She closed her eyes. A moment later she heard his footfalls on the tiles. He came and squatted down in front of her. She didn’t move. He was dressed in a dark bathrobe, water still clinging to the hair on his arms and legs. He smiled and with his right hand he pushed back a strand of damp hair that had fallen from behind her ear. Still she didn’t react. In the darkness she could barely make out his eyes. He kissed her gently, playing with her lips, suggesting she play back. She followed, then broke away. She put her head back against the chair and closed her eyes.
He leaned forward and kissed her again, this time on the forehead. She frowned, as if the gesture were in some way painful to her. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. He took her hand and guided it underneath his robe to his half-erect penis. She left it there for a moment. They smiled. Both his invitation and her touch felt more about comfort than passion.
“You look cool,” she said.
“It won’t last. You’re already hot again.”
“Mmm . . .” She let out a long exhalation, half breath, half sigh.
“Are you all right?”
She took her time. “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you come and lie down?”
“I should have called.”
He traced her face with his finger. “It’s okay. She’ll be fine. You said so yourself. We’ll do it in the morning.”
“You shouldn’t have let me fall asleep.”
He smiled. “It was only for an hour or so. You were tired.”
She brushed this aside. “I feel bad about her.”
He looked at her seriously for a moment. “You know what I think, Anna?” he said, as he ran a slow finger down her arm. “I think you feel bad because if you’re really honest you don’t mind that she’s not here.”
“Well . . .” She sat with it for a while, acknowledging the hit. It was a measure of their closeness that she didn’t feel the need to deny it. “If you get any smarter I’ll probably have to be frightened of you.”
He smiled. “What’s the problem? Not used to the competition, eh?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
She looked around the room. In the darkness the tiled floor was like a skating rink, an expanse of ice with a pale mist lying on top of it. It looks so cool, she thought, so inviting. But it isn’t. This is how people drown. They mistake exhilaration for safety.
He stood up and made a move to walk away.
“No.” She put out a hand to stop him. “Don’t go.”
“I’m tired, Anna,” he said softly. “I want to sleep and I want you to come and sleep next to me.”
When was the last time she had lain next to a man she wanted to wake up with? A lifetime ago. Certainly too long ago to remember. “I can’t come yet. I don’t know how to cross the floor.”
If he found the remark oblique he didn’t show it. Maybe he understood it. He sat down at her feet again, this time laying his head on her lap, his hair cold and wet against the heat of her legs and stomach. She put a hand on the top of his head and stroked him slowly; then she leaned forward, draping her body over his. They stayed like that for a long time. The air around them began to change, the darkness breaking up with the first hint of a summer dawn. She slid her hands under the back of the bathrobe, massaging, caressing downward until she reached the cleft in his buttocks. She pushed further, sliding a finger across the crack of his anus. He moaned at her touch, then twisted himself up and around to meet her. As they met he pushed his bathrobe open and pulled her to him inside.
“Come to bed.”
“Okay. But we mustn’t sleep.”
He laughed. “I think there’s very little chance of that. I tell you what. We’ll be like an old married couple. I’ll put on an alarm.”
Afterward, they slept curled away from each other, their bodies disentangling in search of more familiar spaces alone. Or maybe it was the heat.
At dawn he got up quietly and closed the outer shutters to keep out the sun. The room descended into black. She slept on. At 6:37 A.M. too many Florentines got up at once and the local generating station hiccuped into a moment’s power cut. The radio alarm by the bed flashed off, then on again, all previous instructions wiped from memory, the numbers randomly rearranged. It beeped a sad electronic apology. There was no one awake to hear it.
Home—Saturday A.M.
I’VE ALWAYS FOUND it easy to mock the police. When you’re young they reek of auth
ority, upholding laws that you’re breaking, breaking ones that you uphold; then, as you grow older, they get younger and you mistrust them for that, too. But when something bad happens in your life, when you need help and there is no one else, the chances are that the policemen you get will not be the corrupt ones they make the TV documentaries about, but the other, everyday lot: job, life, troubles, and venial sins, just like your own. Like the two smooth-faced young men who came to Anna’s door that morning, sweating slightly in their heavy uniforms, their helmets tucked under their arms and a halo of community policing around their heads.
Paul wasn’t at his best by then, and neither was I. We had both begun the day on too little sleep. I had heard so many cars pulling up during the night that I could no longer tell which were dreams and which reality, but when I woke with a start to hear sounds in the kitchen I was careful not to be disappointed to find that it was only Paul. Against the odds Lily was still asleep.
He was sitting at the table with a pot of coffee and the telephone directory in front of him, and I could feel a new tension about him, as if somewhere in the night fear had overwhelmed hope, and he was worried now that we had done the wrong thing in waiting. It’s possible that he saw the same thing in me, because his hand moved toward the phone as soon as our eyes met. Before he could get to it, it rang under his fingers. We both started with the sound. He grabbed the receiver and I heard what sounded like a female voice in his ear. It’s over, I thought. She’s back. I knew she would be. He shook his head at me immediately.
“Oh, Patricia, hello. How was your journey? Good, good. No, no, nothing.” He paused. “No, she’s fine. She’s still asleep. Yes, I know, we’ve already discussed it and I think we’ll have to do that. Yeah, she got here last night. Do you want to talk to her?”
He handed it on to me.
She has the nicest voice, Patricia, soft, as I imagine the Irish countryside after the rain (a sentimental idea, I know, and one that I would never dare to admit to her), and somehow patient. She was calling from her sister’s on the outskirts of Dublin; in the background you could hear the house waking up to the swish of wedding dresses and the smell of hair spray.
She felt the need to tell me everything she had already told Paul. It was clear she was afraid that all of this was somehow her fault. Anna’s trip had been so last-minute she was worried that she had got the days or the times wrong. She had been certain Anna had told her Thursday night, but when she didn’t turn up she wondered if maybe she had meant Friday. If only she had called Paul earlier or had checked the hotel number . . . fear like a petrol line of fire was running through us all now.
I did my best to reassure her. I saw her standing by the phone, a small energetic woman in her early fifties. She’d probably already be dressed for the day. Would she wear a hat to church? Presumably. Catholic wedding, Catholic customs. She didn’t seem the type for hats—too down-to-earth. She never really cared that much about her appearance.
Patricia was the mother we all used to have before feminism arrived to split the nuclear atom. The woman who knew how to get rust stains out of a colored dress, but who would never fill out her own tax form because that was man’s work. She had three grown-up children of her own and had agreed to take on Lily because she couldn’t get out of the habit of mothering. She had been part of this unorthodox family since Lily was six months old, first full-time, now as child care after school and in the holidays. The love affair was mutual. She would have done anything for them, and what hurt most was that there was nothing she could do now.
I told her that if we decided to call the police they might need to check some details with her; would it be all right if I gave them her sister’s number? She said yes, but that nobody would be back until late tonight. And had we remembered that Lily had a swimming lesson at 11:00? And that her friend Kylie’s mum would be picking her up at 10:30 and that her swimsuit was on the hook by the washing machine? I lied and told her that we had and that she was to forget all about this now and we would see her—all of us—when she got back on Monday afternoon. And to wish her niece all the best for the day. And then I put down the phone and told Paul I thought we should call the police now.
I made tea while he did it. I heard him getting through. This is someone’s job, I thought. They deal with this kind of thing every day of the week. He walked to the other end of the room so he didn’t have to look at me and when it came to the relevant bit he described himself as a close friend of the family. He was saying something else when Lily appeared in the doorway.
“Hi, Lil,” I said loudly, because he hadn’t seen her. “You look hungry.”
He turned and gave her a wave, moving out into the garden. She watched him go, then padded in and sat herself at the table.
“Breakfast?” I said. “How about pancakes? I’ll do the flour if you crack the eggs.”
“It’s Saturday,” she announced. “I’ve got my swimming lesson this morning. Mum said she’d be home for that.”
“Well, sweetheart, she’s not going to be able to make it. Kylie and her mum are going to go with you instead.”
Lily scowled. “But she promised.” I waited for her to make a thing about it, but instead she said: “Why can’t you or Paul take me?”
Outside I heard Paul’s voice—“Yep, yep. That’s fine. We’ll be here. Thank you.”
“Lily says can we make swimming at eleven?” I said as he came back in.
He clicked back the receiver. “Sorry, squirt. Estella and I have got work to do. But I think we could probably manage McDonald’s afterward.”
She shook her head. “I’m fed up with Chicken McNuggets.” I raised an eyebrow. “You’re lucky, Estella,” she said. “In your country the cows haven’t gone mad.”
They arrived ten minutes after the swimming party left. It was so warm we sat out in the garden around the slatted wood table, self-assembly Ikea, circa 1995. I remembered it well. I had got a blood blister from jamming my thumb in between the slats. Lily had put on her doctor’s uniform to deal with it.
Their very presence made her absence more sinister, and I found myself feeling sick again, the kind of nausea you sometimes get in important meetings when you have to talk for too long. Paul was more settled, but then he is better at playacting than I am. What would they think of us; father and friend? And would what they thought mean anything?
I have to say they were good at it, thorough and sensitive, trained to deal with jagged nerves. Name, age, height, weight, coloring, clothes. All those little boxes to fill in. Anna formed like some verbal hologram in front of our eyes.
Missing person, Anna Franklin, Ms.: age thirty-nine, height five seven. Striking—“pretty” was always too tame a word for her—good build (a little heavier since Lily, but she could carry it), with thick black hair cut in a wedge, open face, broad forehead, and full lips in a slight Cupid’s bow.
Identifying marks: pierced ears, no body rings, but a small blue elephant tattoo on her ankle. (No bluebirds or panthers, she had insisted, too New Age. Why not have it full-sized?, I had suggested, as I sat with her in a seafront shop in Brighton watching the needle buzz.)
Clothes: in general, stylish, probably more expensive than she could afford; in particular, no idea, though Paul claimed she had a yellow linen jacket that she hadn’t left the house without for the last two months and that wasn’t on the hat stand now, and who was I to contradict him?
Character: clever, funny, intense, loving.
There was a pause when we came to the end of the list. Anna? Was that it? I thought about her. There were other things, but I didn’t know how to put them into words. At least, not for strangers.
“Any history of depression, mental illness, that kind of thing?”
“None.” Two voices on a single thought.
“Does she often spend time away?”
“The odd night here and there for work,” said Paul briskly.
“And who looks after the little girl then?”
“If it’s in the week, Patricia, the child minder, stays. At weekends I’m usually around.”
“But you’re not the child’s father?”
“No. Not biologically, that is. But I see a lot of them.”
“So could you tell us what the nature of your relationship with Ms. Franklin is?”
Paul smiled. “We’re just good friends, Officer,” he said prettily.
“I see.” Though it was clear he didn’t. “So if there was someone else, I mean if she was seeing another man, you wouldn’t necessarily know that? She wouldn’t tell you?”
“Au contraire—she most certainly would.” He had been so good up till now, not a hint of camp in his performance, and you could see how this one had been irresistible. It came so out of left field that I’m not sure they recognized it anyway. Sweet boys. “But she hasn’t. Told me, that is.”
How about me?, I thought, I’m her best friend. Who would know if I didn’t? They must have heard me thinking and looked in my direction.
I shook my head. “She didn’t have a lover. She would have told me if she did.”
There was a small silence. I got the impression they were checking their list, making sure all their little boxes were properly annotated.
You could see how from their point of view this wasn’t unfolding like your average nuclear family. I wondered how much it mattered. Surely most policemen must have waded through enough dirty washing to realize that the dynamics of contemporary life are more complex than current political rhetoric would have you believe.
“So she’s never gone missing like this before?”
It wasn’t what you’d call a long pause, but there was a definite charge to it. Since it was inevitable that they would, at some point, ask the question, it made it even stranger that we had chosen not to discuss it before they came. Across the table they were looking expectantly. First we should have decided which one of us was going to answer it.
I took a breath. “A few years ago she went off for a bit without telling anyone. But it wasn’t for long, and it was before Lily was born. She wouldn’t do that now.”
Nevertheless, they were interested. How could they not be? It was on the form.